Back After a Busy Summer

It’s the chickens again.

Actually, it’s the winter coming again. After an extremely busy summer and fall, it's time to record the many thoughts and feelings which have passed, and which are present now. First among them: cold weather approaches.

Everything changes when the weather gets cold. Elementals like water, equipment, clothing, materials, and yes, chicken care all shift when the weather gets cold. When I lived in the city, the only significant change that winter imposed on me was having to wear a jacket and sometimes footgear that could get wet.

In the city and suburb we go from weatherproof, heated spaces to other similarly shielded spaces in mobile weather-protected capsules that are equally well heated. We are so well insulated from the elements that we come to ignore forces of nature. For most of us devastating fire or flood is something we experience as images on television.

In our overly insulated lives we have lost touch with basics of life that have driven culture and inventions for centuries. We forget (or worse, never learn) that cold can be dangerous, uncomfortable and terribly inconvenient. Not here.

It’s time to cut or buy firewood. The old-timers know what’s coming so they cut firewood in the summer and stack it so it’s dry and easy to burn when it’s needed. New-timers like us, until we learned, figure that like going to the supermarket where you can get anything at any time, firewood is equally easy to come by, so we never prepared. This error can be costly in several ways, not just monetary.

Observing the way people here dance with the seasons is a lesson in fables. Or perhaps schoolhouse fables come to life when you live close to nature, as we do here in an old stone house that’s been through more than 200 winters. There’s ancient wisdom here to be understood.

Fables were developed to convey wisdom and life knowhow from one generation to another. The format was one in which no one was preaching down to another but the point got across, at least to those who were listening.

As our unusually warm fall suddenly reverts to normal frigidity, a fable that comes to mind would be that of the grasshopper who didn’t prepare for the winter, and had to be saved by the wiser ants who set aside food.

Same thing here. If you didn’t think ahead, and now need firewood as the cold winds blow, you’ll pay a price for it. High BTU wood like oak or elm goes for a premium as cold weather approaches. And well-dried wood is even more expensive, if you can find it. The newbies compete for a scarce supply. One person I know counts on the careless grasshoppers for much of his annual income. He does this merely by cutting green wood in Spring, and selling it as dry premium firewood in the middle of winter.

Sure, you can get wood at any time. Most of it is fresh cut. Until you’ve tried it, you can’t imagine what a hassle it is to use green wood in a fireplace. It is difficult to ignite and then when it burns it uses much of the released heat just driving off the remaining water in the rest of the log. As a result you get much less heat from the wood. Which means that you use a lot more wood for the same amount of heat gained. This is not merely a financial impact – it’s a lot more wood to handle.

Our home uses about 3 cords of dry wood in an average winter. That’s a full dumptruck full of wood, weighing 10,000 pounds or five tons. It takes a long day of repetitious bending, lifting and handling just to stack it. Then as the wood is used, it is unstacked and brought inside. which converts into many trips outside and back. It means extra deliveries when the outside grass is mushy, and the large truck leaves deep ruts in the lawn. This converts into further work in the Spring to correct. And that’s if you get dry seasoned wood. If you get green wood you’ll handle an additional 2 1/2 tons. Twice – once when stacking and again when you move it inside. Once you’ve gone through this, it makes you think ahead the second year,

If you have a few old trees and a chain saw, you can get fuel for free. If you cut it early and let it dry, you have much less wood to stack , much more efficient heat, and fewer trips outside to reload the fireplace.

Before living here, I doubt if I would have believed that firewood would involved so much forethought and planning.

Coping with winter heating is a complex subject out here. When your house is surrounded with frigid cold, you want a reliable, cheap solution. Emphasis on reliable. Emphasis in many cases, on cheap.

A big fad here at the moment is the corn furnace, which burns dried corn kernels. Feed corn is in abundance here, which makes for a cheap solution. Other people have outdoor wood-burning furnaces, clean gas fired heating, oil furnaces, LPG heaters, a whole range of technologies.

In all cases, it’s about coping with cold.

People here are in most cases of modest means, in some cases quite wealthy, and in surprisingly many cases, prosperous and comfortable. There isn’t much poverty here, but there is very little exposed wealth, either.

The culture is modest, interconnective, and almost always genial. There are many vectors that form the cultural matrix here, but at least one strong component comes from a shared experience of past hardships and a resulting attitude of tolerance:

Everyone got cold in the old days, and a lot of people still get cold.

Cold is, when you face it for real, frightening on a profoundly primeval level. This fear goes basic very fast. Just walking outside in a still, very cold night when you know there is no help for miles around, and coyotes are on the prowl, is enough to force shivers and fears into your deepest being.

To go from that feeling of exposure and fear, into a warm house, smelling rich aromas of good food, seeing the welcoming flames of a well-stoked fire, and being welcomed by strong dogs who express every feeling from unreserved love to total fearlessness is to know an equally primeval and deep sense of protection from cold.

Such experience is available to very few people these days, which is a shame. To know such feelings is to be in touch with earth, nature, life and reality in ways that are richly intense and connected to elemental sources of our instincts.

Cold affects ordinary things, which imposes pre-emptive activity. Like water-based paint. It’s no good if it freezes, so if you want to preserve your touch-up paint, you bring it in. Elmer’s glue goes bad if frozen, and if you don’t have that magical stuff for a minor repair, it’s a 22 mile round trip to get some new. Expensive power packs for power tools go dead. Letting a drill battery freeze is an expensive mistake – my Panasonic drill battery pack retails for $96. Ruined if frozen, fine if kept inside.

Or more important, water lines. One of the rituals of on-coming cold weather here is the draining and purging of water lines. You have not lived until you have walked into a basement full of waist-high freezing water in the middle of the night to shut off the water going into a busted pipe, as I once had to do. Such experiences teach the wisdom of not being a grasshopper.

We’re not yet at the point of purging the water lines that reach out to the barn and garden, but the decision will have to be made soon. It’s a royal disaster if one of the lines going through the barn and out to the chicken coop (them again!) or to the garden bursts. However, after the water is shut off, it becomes a royal pain in the ass to have to hand-carry water from the house to the chicken coop in cold weather. So we delay and hope to not be caught by a pipe-breaker freeze. In the depths of really cold weather, we often think about getting rid of “them damn chickens. “

The bright and wise observer, perhaps not used to caring for chickens in winter will ask, why not simply use a heater for the chicken’s water? This is an astute observation, and the flaw could only be known if you realize that chickens must have water at all times. Even with a heater, you still have to replenish the supply and without the convenient outlet next to the coop, life becomes charmingly ancient and zen-like, as in, chop wood, carry water. Only in our case, it’s stack wood, carry water.

A cynic might ask, why not just get rid of the pesky poultry and buy eggs at the grocery store? Indeed.

Ah. Well, this goes to the heart question of whether a rural life is worthwhile. Such an investigation it touches many important values about life. We really enjoy feeding and caring for these pea-brained idiots. It’s also a prime part of the fabric of our life, to wake up and hear the roosters crowing, or to see the chicken antics as they dig for worms or fluff wings, or in the case of the cocks, posture and crow.

If we got rid of the chickens, they would be eaten. Not that I’m really against eating chickens but when it comes to our chickens it’s a different thing. In the end, if I have to get rid of one of our chickens, I want to be the ender. Which means, ulp, learning how to kill, bleed, eviscerate, de-feather, dress, and butcher a chicken.

I can avoid this difficulty by saying (truthfully) more importantly, it’s about the eggs.

Once, at a Denny’s restaurant in Emeryville, CA., I had a egg and bacon breakfast which made me swear off eggs for two years. The eggs had so many hormones I could taste them. It was an off-putting, slightly frightening chemical oral assault. I felt betrayed and conceivably endangered by the assembly-line hidden egg production source that produced eggs with such an overlay of synthetic chemistry.

Here, our chickens give us wholesome, clean and richly flavored eggs, free of any off tastes. They taste great and make wonderful ingredients in all kinds of delicious foods, from simple fried eggs to complex desserts. You can see the difference if you fry one our eggs next to a store-bought egg. One is pale, pallid, soft and without much substance, the other is richly yellow, firm and full of life and color.


As I said, it’s the chickens again.

With the change in season, we have to prepare them for the coming cold. That means setting up the water heater, adding much more straw to the bedding, shutting off vents that could bring in cold air to their tiny bodies, and …

Adding light.

Despite the unusual warmth of this season, one thing didn’t change: the progression of dawn and dusk times. Unless we think mankind’s arrogance in ignoring global warming extends to denial of the orbit of the planet itself, it’s necessary to see that the sun rises and sets at different times as winter approaches.

And now we come to the wisdom of chickens. If you were a chicken, wouldn’t you want to make it so that your eggs hatched in warm times, so they could grow up with the best possible chance of becoming handsome roosters or winsome hens by the time winter arrived?

You win the chicken survival quiz. I won’t try to stretch your imagination further into how a chicken thinks, if in fact they do. Suffice it to say that as the season gets closer to winter, the amount of daylight shortens, and egg production drops off correspondingly to a dead halt.

In the combined and incredibly massive lore of chicken husbandry, someone cottoned to the link between light and egg production, and a great truth was learned: a hen’s egg-production system is governed by the amount of light in a day. She will lay more or fewer eggs depending on the way light levels seem to indicate the season.

From which we gain an important egg production maxim: if you want more eggs in winter, increase the hours of daylight! How? Put a light in the coop and time it so that the chickens get at least 15 hours of light a day.

It’s rather amazing how effective this is. By programming the light in the coop to go on from 3AM to 8 AM, egg production goes from a chancy 2-3 a week to 8 a day!

It’s the chickens again.



And a whole lot more…